


there is no reason to keep the mask

by dudavocado



Category: The Inheritance Trilogy - N. K. Jemisin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 11:57:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dudavocado/pseuds/dudavocado
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world takes some getting used to when it is in your hands and pouring through your fingers at the same time. </p><p>It had not been such a malleable thing before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there is no reason to keep the mask

**Author's Note:**

  * For [forgosa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgosa/gifts).



> This isn't quite what you asked for and doesn't end quite the way I would have wanted it to, to match what you asked for, but I do hope you enjoy it and I'm glad I got a chance to revisit the first book in order to write this for you. Happy Holidays.

 

 

> _I am dazed and enraged and struck in the increasing animal difficulty for me of the moment._
> 
> \- Harold Brodkey, "The Pain Continuum"

 

 

 

In the beginning, her memory still plays tricks on her.

No. That’s not what she means to suggest.

In the beginning, her memory stretches and wrenches itself apart into what she must know—knowledge written into her marrow—and the superfluous stuff that has always haunted her.

There are the dreams from before that she could not explain.

She knows what they mean now and how they come.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

Yeine does not dream as she used to.

She is still participant and observer, but she can tell memory—her own—from fantasy and from the dream stuff given over to mortals and gods alike. 

Only Maelstrom can explain where it comes from and Yeine expects little from Maelstrom. Even in the early years.

She likes mortals in abstract and definite ways. They look and feel so different now.

When she touches them, they leave themselves behind in her skin. It takes some getting used to when she dreams.

There is a why to everything she knows about the souls she sees and the memories she gleans.

Enefa had not made humans easy and between the Three dreams were less so but,

Yeine breathes. Wakes. She keeps forgetting.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

There are children at first and many she must kill.

They are all unexpected, brilliant, monstrous and beautiful, some not unfamiliar to her in their form and others she waits too long—seconds really—to name and still many more she kills too quickly, with the wrong word or the wrong touch. 

Yeine is not scared of them, but she is doubtful. She has a more discerning eye for survival. 

At first, the God’s tongue is demanding of her and a part of her, but she’ll say one word and mean another and act with that other word and many wonderful worlds will be created but also several hells. 

She spends many hours destroying and creating with the colors bright before her woven together richer than they ever were. 

The world takes some getting used to when it is in your hands and pouring through your fingers at the same time. 

It had not been such a malleable thing before.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

The first death is—she remembers the salt of Itempas’ tears and bright and fiery shock and that he’d been warm and she’d been glad so very glad to see him to lie with him then he’d dulled, everything had, and then cold black longing and rage before she’d joined the sheer number of things dying with her.

The first death wakes her and coats her with sweat and has her gasping and crying and many times clawing with rage she can’t control. 

These are the moments that have her visiting Hado and seeking out the places, Itempas has been, but they also send her to the Shadow and Darre and many of the other kingdoms. 

She finds farmers and warriors and maidens—they blush when she calls them fair or they scowl but they all accept her, want her in their own way.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

She visits Darre, with Sieh in tow; the look of recognition that flits across her grandmother’s face at the sight of him does not surprise her. 

She looks at Sieh questioningly before he shrugs but his smile is boyish charm and sweetness. She is not as forgiving as she once was, but he can explain when he’s ready too.

He leaves them and she can sense his frustration as the girls of her village play with and tease him.

Her grandmother explains that the war is not quite over, but the current calm is welcome and much needed. 

Yeine would do more if it were requested of her. She would call Zhakkarn to slice through their enemies. 

Yeine would do it herself, but that longing is from before. 

“What did they do to you?” 

“What you feared.” 

Later, she can feel her grandmother’s grief through an old thread, much older than it should be and younger too.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

Humans are her children and she used to be, well she used to be a lot more and a lot less than she is now. 

She likes them more than she possibly should considering her promises and considering the need to take a step back. 

Most of the time, not always, she approaches as observer.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

She doesn’t always avoid Sky. 

Doesn’t like to think of it as avoiding, but after many years Itempas leaves the palace and curiosity brings her to his rooms. 

She knows where he is, could find him in seconds if she wanted, less than, but they are not ready for all of that. 

His rooms look like her old rooms and are even on the same floor, which surprises her.  She imagined they would put him closer to the sky. In fact, she imagined they would put him in Dekarta’s old rooms.  

His room is simple and still kept for him. 

It smells heavily of the World Tree though none of the tree’s leaves or branches reaches into the room. 

She could feel him, stubborn, starving and dying in here for many months. The taste of Nahadoth’s pleasure, rich and sweet as wine made from the darkest berries was familiar as Itempas’ fury, which was not human would never be human even trapped in mortal flesh. 

She felt his shallow breaths because he had the body she made the form she gave—well, the Three, the Three Before, gave—she wonders if he knew that, still knows it. 

Then she chides herself for wondering. Itempas is nothing if not deliberate.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

(Many years later, she will lie with him and wonder at the calm in him and delight in it too. He will tell her, his palm warm against her back, I’ve missed you. Not out loud. He is stubborn as anything, but he will tell her and she will know. 

Strange the feeling of trusting him with any of her, his hands have—she longs to push the violence aside, but forgetting would be the worse of betrayals to Nahadoth and Enefa and worse still to Itempas. 

He holds onto her after. His loneliness seeps into her skin. 

She trusts him and offers that.)

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

The weirdest part of being a god is that she is still incomplete.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

She speaks with Hado sometimes. 

He is one to be careful with, she thinks, but Nahadoth finds her worries amusing, but under his amusement, she can sense an irritation though she cannot pinpoint the exact cause. 

“You are the same to him and always have been.” 

 _And more so._  In different ways, she thinks _less_. 

Hado is always happy to see her. No. He’s always welcoming. Not quite.

There isn’t an Amn word for the feeling. She feels it too. 

(Itempas would have the word, language being his domain and absence of expression being something he abhorred, but there’s no asking him or Hado and Nahadoth would not care.)

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

There are funny things about Hado. 

He still attempts intimidation. He is foolishly unafraid of her, of Nahadoth, of Itempas— 

One day, after she found him in Itempas’ room, he told her that when the Bright Father—his smile sometimes reminds her of Nahadoth’s teeth shining in the dark of his many faces and forms. His smile is sometimes everything a smile can be. 

He told her he used to come to watch the Bright Father die and be born and die again. 

“It grew old for him too soon.”  His eyes had flickered over her and she remembers with renewed disgust what was done to him and how he survived it and how— 

“Do you know how I was chosen?” 

“No.”

“It was a punishment. The others were given to their own forms, the bodies they usually chose or could choose when they were among mortals. Nahadoth was different and I was,” he smiles and his eyes flick across her breastbone. “It doesn’t matter. That’s what you would say or would have said, I imagine. No use speaking of the dead.”  

He looks at her again with an expression she’s seen in Sieh’s eyes and Nahadoth’s and sometimes Zhakkarn’s, but Zhakkarn is not so open in her expressions as the other three and Yeine knows only that what she longs for is not in Yeine’s domain to give her. 

The next question is hers. “Do you remember being born?” 

He blinks. Once. Twice. “Does it matter?”

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

She remembers the Maelstrom, has seen it since _her_ birth and many times in between. It doesn’t frighten her, but leaves her, hands shaking and numb, with a sense of foreboding and wonder. 

Nahadoth offers to take her within it and she laughs before realizing he is serious. 

She eyes the void that is not a void, the form without form. 

“You can go by yourself, if you’d rather.” 

Yeine ignores his words and takes a step away from him. “What would a mortal see?” 

He waits and the night that is his body shifts and flows around him, but his face remains oddly still. “It is not like I am.” 

“No.” She turns to him now, takes comfort in him shifting around her in the seconds it takes to feel solid flesh under her hands. “What I mean is, in the moments before death, what would a mortal see?” 

She is still considering his offer and her own questions when he says, “You can get these answers for yourself. Create and do as you see fit and accept whatever the cost may be.” 

Yeine wants to remind him that she is still so much younger than he and Itempas. God’s hands and will and power aside, she cannot forget being human—though the remembering is not what it was. 

She changes the subject. “You were born here?” 

“Yes.” As if sensing her next question, he continues, “It was unpleasant.” 

Same as for everyone, she imagines, not the being born but the after. 

Once again, she reminds herself to be careful with him and her power over him, as his pain washes over her. She reaches for and finds his fingers fitting between hers.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

The second time she doesn’t remember, but her people tell the story of her mother closing her legs, fighting nature and failing as all mortals fail, to stop her birth.

It was more painful for her mother than Yeine and even with her power now she can’t parse a physical feeling from the experience. 

The third time beats a permanent reminder in her chest. She remembers it with the same clarity as her death. 

The birth this time was painful. No. It was prodigious and clarifying and for an agonizing second incredibly lonely—strange considering, she had not known before she was never alone. 

The first birth she doesn’t remember. It wasn't hers.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

T’vril is the one to tell her.

“They call you the Gray Lady.” 

They are in his chambers and he is going over papers, passing punishments and judgments and feeding his people. He is doing everything she knew him to be capable of, but a part of her finds him strange.

She finds his labors strange. 

“ _Gray_ Lady.” 

“It’s what passes for cleverness these days.” He swallows and glances at her, his lips hesitate over a smile. “It is a name given in love though.”

Yes. This she can feel. 

“It’s better than barbarian.” 

T’vril laughs a moment after she smiles and she’s glad for it and for causing it.

 

 

__

 


End file.
